


In The Middle Of A Windstorm, You Shook Me Up

by judgementdays



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: M/M, angsty shit man, i've been reading winnie-the-pooh so idk where this is coming from
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-01
Updated: 2013-03-01
Packaged: 2017-12-03 22:55:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/703576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/judgementdays/pseuds/judgementdays
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>depression is scary, h. i think i’ve never felt so alone. maybe it’s because i am alone. i wonder how you are, where you are, who’re you with. </p><p>or</p><p>louis writes and harry paints and sometimes things don't work out. (there's a happy ending)</p>
            </blockquote>





	In The Middle Of A Windstorm, You Shook Me Up

**Author's Note:**

> wow ok so i had such bad writers block for like 4 months and now i'm spitting out idea's all over the place. 
> 
> i got the idea from a poem we read in class, but it turned out way different than what i planned. (i think is was Emily Dickinson's No Body, but i could be wrong, idk man) 
> 
> it's not in first person, despite what the summary is telling u and yeah. 
> 
> dedicated to marky for having this saved for me, ur a doll!!!! ((also mary ily))
> 
> also, briefly edited, briefly revised, if u find a mistake just keep all comments to urself 
> 
> keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times. enjoy the ride.

prologue:

They're both lonely is the thing. They're a mess of two lovers, two broken souls who can't seem to find their way. Two rights mixed up in a world of wrongs. 

It's funny how things work out, though. How all can seem at lost, though two broken people can find their way back to each other, despite the fights, the wrongs and everything in between. 

Most people give up on love after heart break and for a while, so did these two souls. 

But you always find your way back to your soul mate....

+

Louis lays alone in his bed, thinking. He’s been doing a lot of that lately, just thinking. He thinks about his past, his future, why the earth is round, why two plus two is four. He thinks he likes thinking better than speaking because no one can judge you in your thoughts. 

His phone keeps ringing, though he’s been ignoring it for weeks. It could be months, or even days, he’s not sure. The power has gone out so the clocks are all wrong and he doesn't keep a calender. His boss keeps sending his paychecks home, even though he never shows up. 

He thinks he likes living this isolated life. He thinks he’d rather lay down in bed forever, rather than have to get up and actually do something. 

Though he hates to admit it, everything he does reminds him of Harry. He can feel his lips when he lays down, smell his cologne when he curls his arms around himself.

He sees him on paintings around the flat, hears him whistling when he walks down the hall, and he can still taste him when he licks his lips in just the right way, tongue sliding over the bottom half of his lip. He’s not sure if it’s healthy or even partly sane, but the depression settling inside of him is telling him differently. 

“I love you,” Louis says up to the ceiling one day. 

“I love you,” Louis cries to the paintings Harry left behind, stacked up in the corner, one after another.

“I love you,” Louis yells to the fridge, closes his eyes as tears stream down his face.

He’s silent for a long while, waiting to see if he gets any sign of “I love you,” back. 

The heater churns. The fan whirls. The flat stays silent.

“I’m sorry,” Louis whispers, swallows thickly. 

He doesn't want to think about this any longer, so he curls his knees up to his chest and tries to fall into a dream.

This is not the first, nor the last time he falls asleep crying

+

It’s a month after the incident when Louis takes up writing again. He crawls to the bathroom, where he hides his used journals, grabbing one with fresh pages and a pen as he leans against the door and puts the pen to the page.

It writes for himself, honestly, because Louis’ just watching as words fly across the page, not even in sentences, just heart broken little phrases.

“Fuck,” and “I’m sorry,” come up multiple times. So do, “Why,” and “Alone,” but they are smaller, more hidden.

After the page is filled with words, he analyses it. The bigger words are his deepest thoughts, the ones he spends the most time thinking about. The smaller words, the sketches of words that are hidden by the blocked letters are the ones that he tries his hardest not to think about.

He wonders if Harry paints still. 

He wonders if Harry’s okay. 

He thinks he’ll die at least a little bit happy if he knows Harry’s fine.

Louis stares at the page of words for a long while before he starts to make them into sentences. He likes poetry, likes the way it sounds, but today, he’s writing a story. 

A tragedy, if you will.

He’s not sure how long he’s in the bathroom, back pressed against the sadly chipped paint wall but when he finally fills up the rest of the page, he realizes it’s not a tragedy nor a story at all, but a letter.

h,

i think i’m much like this chipped paint. i think everyone’s got a little chipped paint in them. like, no one really bothers to fix up the chipped paint unless it’s really noticeable. i think when the paint scratches off even more is when it starts to become harder to brush off, harder to look away. maybe that’s what we are as humans, falling bits of chipped paint, waiting for someone to notice us, to fix us up. i think when i was with you, i wasn't chipped. or maybe i was, and i was too blind to see. i think you’re the one to fix my chipped paint, harry. i think i need you to give me a new coat of fresh paint. maybe, if you need it, i’ll paint you over again as well.  
i love you.

Louis reads it three times, nodding over every word and sentence. He never writes with capitalization, remembers how much that bothered Harry. 

He tears out the page from the notebook carefully and folds it slowly into a paper airplane. He sets it on his lap, thinking, before he snakes his way over to the window. This could be seen as littering, maybe, but he throws it across the balcony anyway. 

“I love you,” Louis says to himself, turning his back to the falling paper. He hopes whoever finds it get’s at what he’s trying to say.

+

Louis decides to leave the house two days later.

It’s a big decision, and he showers, puts on new clothes, does his hair and everything. It feels nice to be clean.

He’s only ten steps outside the flat, the cold air hitting him roughly and turning his cheeks pink when he steps on a piece of paper. 

It’s from a journal, he can tell at once and he bends down to reach for it, grasping it in his hands as he does so, and when he turns the lined paper around, he can say he’s pleasantly surprised.

It’s a drawing of a boy.

It’s done out of pencil, but it’s fantastic, almost as great as some of Harry’s work. It’s shaded and when Louis squints he sees words covering the drawings skin. Louis folds it up carefully as he places it in his pocket, before he carries on his way down town.

He tries not to think about how the drawing looks like him, but his mind is a constant whirl wind and he’s not sure how that’s going to work out for him. 

And if his head turns one too many times at every curly haired head he sees, no one has to know.

+

Louis writes daily now. He went out and bought ten new notebooks, just in case he never wants to go out again, and locks himself in the bathroom to write. Most are poems, but every few days he ends up writing another letter, not really on purpose but not by mistake either.

h,

depression is scary, h. i think i’ve never felt so alone. maybe it’s because i am alone. i wonder how you are, where you are, who’re you with.  
i think i want to be water in my next life. i think being water could mean a lot to someone and i’d never fall in love and people need water to live. i want to be something someone needs, i want to feel needed. do you think, in another life, i was someones everything? i want to be someones everything. i want to be your everything, h, but i hope you’ve found someone who loves you more than life. you really deserve it.  
i love you

+

Every letter starts and ends the same. He knows who they’re for, and every time he finishes he folds them up into the plane and sends them out their way. He wonders who finds them, who discovers them. He wonders if they get thrown away or if they’re treasured forever.

Besides Louis’ letter scavenger hunt, he’s also been finding scratches of drawings, every time he steps out of the flat. Some are painted and most of are the same face. Some are just sketched out quickly, but every time Louis finds one, he pins it onto the bulletin board he keeps.

He has yet to turn on his phone, but he’s getting better. He showers daily and cleans up around the flat. He spends a majority of his time thinking and writing, but there’s no one to really talk to anyway, so it’s no point to get back into the talking routine.

+

One night, after darkness has fallen, Louis stares at the drawings that are pinned up, and he tries to discover them. He traces his finger over the pencil markings, and as his stomach dips and churns, he can only think one thing.

He doesn't want to say it out loud, though, so he blindly reaches for the open journal and flips to a random page before he begins to write.

h,

once, when i was little, i had a hamster. his name was skittles. skittles was very energetic and ran on his wheel all day, for weeks. then, two or so months later, skittles became very sad, lonely. he stopped running and stopped eating, so my mum suggested we get him a friend. so we did. my second hamsters name was reeses. reeses and skittles were the best of friends, you see. so much more than what i thought they’d be. out of the blue one day, though, skittles died. he was buried in the backyard. recces now, of course, became sad, but i thought none of it, until recces escaped from his cage. as you can imagine, the house was a war area, no one wanting to step anywhere, not wanting to step on poor skittles but after a week of tiptoeing around the house, my sister found recces outside skittles grave.  
that’s what i call a soul mate, h, and i think, maybe, in another life, we’ll be skittles and reeses. because their love never died  
i love you

+

h,

you know that feeling when you see someone you love? that warm feeling inside, and it’s like a ticking bomb of happiness? i haven’t gotten that feeling in a while. i miss that feeling, you see. i think if i ever see you again, whether it be tomorrow or another life, i’ll still get that feeling around you.  
i love you

+

h,

a paint brush is abused pretty bad, but so is a pencil. they get sharpened and and dipped in paint, some just get dropped and are never retrieved. maybe i’m a pencil, h, and you’re the brush. i think that tools can always go together, despite differences. i think we’re one in the same, h, and i think that we’ve both been abused, in a way. maybe we’ve abused ourselves. or each other. i think every second i spend from you, i’m abusing myself. maybe it’s the same for you, too.  
i love you

+

A week after Louis sends out the hamster letter, he turns his phone on. There is no texts from Harry, like he expected, but one missed call from him. There are 10 missed calls from his mother, 15 from Liam, 20 from Zayn and the rest are drunk texts from Niall. A warm feeling explodes inside of him and he sort of wants to cry. 

He doesn't call them back, not yet, baby steps, he reminds himself, and works on organizing his phone back to normal. His thumb hovers over ‘Harry’ for a few moments before he thinks better of it. His background is still him kissing Harry on the cheek, but he decides not to change it.

He leaves it be and sends out another paper airplane, before going to the store to find milk. He finds a drawing tucked under a garbage can.

It’s the same face, the same features, the same writing every time. He stuffs it in his pocket, hides the smile he knows is forming on his lips.

+

h,  
what if:  
these have been playing in my mind a lot lately.  
what if:  
i think what if’s are the worst questions ever. they never stop, with every question answered forms another ten. i love i love thinking and questions, but what if’s bug me. i think my biggest ‘what if’s’ are simple.  
what if i stopped you from leaving?  
what if we never met?  
what if we kissed one last time? would that change everything?  
i think no matter how hard i think, i always end up choosing the answers to my what if’s in a way that scares me. i think of how empty my life would of been without you. i wonder about the present, the future the past without you in it, even though my future looks like a blank sky, a blank canvas, as you would say.  
i love you.

+

“You are such a fucking shit,” is the first thing Zayn says to him when Louis calls back a few days later.

“I know.”

“Do you know how many times I called you?”

“I know.”

“How many times we all went over to see if you were, I don’t know, alive?”

“I know.”

“Even Harry for Christs sake was worried and, dammit, Lou, where are you? How are you? Jesus, we missed you. We all missed you. I’m sorry. We’re sorry, how are you?” Zayn’s tone becomes softer and suddenly he’s concerned, makes Louis smile a little more. He almost misses the Harry comment.

“I’m at the flat, and I’m sorry, honestly. I needed a bit of time to actually talk to other people but I’m. I’m getting better,” Louis says quietly, fingers tracing over the drawings on the board, “You can come over. Bring the boys,” he adds, because he thinks he sort of wants to see them.

“Great, fucking. Thanks, Lou, we did really miss you,” Zayn says, and he’s smiling and Louis’ spirits lift and he thinks that he’s climbing out of this hole they call depression.

“I missed you guys too,” Louis says softly, and then Zayn hangs up and Louis goes to dress, his heart pounding.

When they arrive fifteen minutes later, they’re’s a lot of hugging. 

Like, more hugging than is probably healthy. They hug and cry a little, clutching each other tight as Louis offers drinks and food, while they curl up on the couch to catch up. They try to drift the conversation away from Harry, but he keeps popping back up.

“How is he?” Louis asks softly. They don’t need to ask who.

“Pretty bad,” Liam says carefully, eyebrows together, “He keeps finding these odd letters, about like hamsters and chipped paint. They’re really odd,” Liam shrugs and Louis’ head flies up, eyes locking with Liam’s.

He clears his throat, fighting to stay causal. “Does he. Um. Keep them?” He asks, hesitantly as he holds his breath and oh, this is it. Make it or break it moment right here.

Niall nods, looking quite frankly, disgusted. “He like. Keeps them in this drawer and reads them every night. It’s creepy,” Niall wrinkles his nose and Louis can’t help the beam radiating off his face. 

Harry.

He barely has time to say anything else before he’s falling over his feet and stumbling to the bulletin board to get the drawings, grabbing them at once as he tugs his coat on.

“Where is he?” Louis says, at the same time Zayn asks,

“Are those Harry’s drawings?”

Louis nods and Liam recites the address of his flat.

Louis’ not an athlete, but he’s never ran faster in his life. 

+

It's a few blocks away, so on the walk over, Louis decides to think. He clutches the pile of drawings, some stuffed under his coat and some he's holding on for the life of him. He's nervous, really, and he hasn't been feeling emotions in a long time. 

He thinks that maybe, maybe, Harry knows the letters are from him, to him. He wonders if Harry thinks as much as he does. He thinks he'll just have to ask.

When he finally gets to Harry's flat, he's a little surprised. It's on the "wrong side of town," with a lot of sketchy buildings and dirty stores, which doesn't sound like posh Harry at all.

He knocks once and rings the doorbell as well, before taking a step back and holding his breath. 

This is it.

Harry opens the door, though it hardly looks like him at all. His hair is falling in his face and he's wearing only boxers that sag low on his hips. Paint is splattered on his chest, some looking stained and old.

He looks worse than Louis did a couple of weeks ago, yet Louis still wants to kiss him. (He thinks that maybe, that's what love is. Being separated from someone for a long time, and, despite how different they look, you still want to kiss him. He thinks maybe he figured out the meaning of this stupid thin called love.)

"Hi," Louis says first, and he thinks Harry doesn't really notice it's him, until he does notice and his whole face sort of rises and falls at the same time. He's not sure if it's a good or bad sign.

"Liam told me. Like, Where you lived, and stuff, and I. Yeah, um, they told me you were finding these letters?" Louis tries to speak, to explain, or to apologize, but all words are lost on his lips when Harry's kissing him.

It's warm and soft and real and pushes himself onto his tiptoes to get moremoremore, arms winding around his neck while Harry blindly reaches for his hips. The tens and tens of paper fall to his feet, but they both don't seem to notice much. Teeth clank together as they both tilt their heads at the same time, and it takes a moment, but they do get situated. Not like they could care about how comfortable they were, not when their soul mate is standing in front of them. Louis' fingers clutch into Harry's curls, nimble little things tugging and pulling and Harry's hands clutch onto his hips and it's hardly a movie kiss, but it's theirs and that's what makes it so real.

Louis thinks that maybe, all the pain and suffering he went through was worth it. He thinks that he'd go through that all again if it meant he'd get to kiss Harry like this in the end.

He thinks that Harry thinks about this just as much.

"I love you," Louis whispers once they pull away, breathing heavy and foreheads pushed together.

"I love you too," Harry croaks back, and there are problems they need to work out, troubles they need to discuss, but in that moment, they're both chipped paint. 

They're Skittles and Reeses 

He's water and Harry needs him, needs him to breathe and survive.

The what if's are answered, because everything he could ever need is smiling down at him, and he thinks that maybe, he won't have to fall asleep alone tonight.

(He doesn't fall asleep alone tonight.)

+

epilogue:

...But you always find your way back to your soul mate, as they say, through ups and downs, and now, two souls are finally align, together again. 

How I love a happy ending.

fin

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr is judgementdays if you want to request/comment/give feedback/ or whatever, so yeah! hope u enjoyed friends!!!
> 
> ~if i never see you again  
> i will always carry   
> inside  
> outside   
> on my fingertips,  
> and at brains edges
> 
> and in centers  
> centers  
> of what i am  
> of what remains~


End file.
